Illegal tree slaughter near Ifrane: organized networks challenge forest agents

Environmental crime is gaining momentum in the Atlas, mainly in the mountain provinces of Ifrane and Midelt.

Well-organized networks, it seems to be helped by accomplices within the organizations responsible for protecting forests, multiply the cup and looting operations of forest trees.

This, in a context where those responsible for repressing these activities are sometimes faced with sanctions, to say the least incomprehensible.

According to Al Akhbar This Monday, April 21, two agents from the National Water and Forests Agency were recently sanctioned in the province of Ifrane, after intercepted a car and pursued a truck carrying stolen wood.

An intervention which revealed the magnitude of cedar wood traffic in the region, but whose sanction that followed has established a climate of mistrust and concern among the other agents responsible for forest protection.

According to informed sources cited by the daily, the sanction pronounced constitutes an unprecedented fact in the history of the agency, as well as the High Commissioner in which it succeeded.

The same sources add that this sanction, taken without prior investigation or official passage before a disciplinary committee, resulted in the transfer of the agents concerned: one was transferred to Bouarfa, the other in the province of Taounate.

These changes finally pushed the interested parties to request the intervention of the Ministry of Agriculture to end their detachment within the National Agency for Water and Forests.

What is intriguing in these transfers is the fact that they intervene just after an operation carried out by those interested in the field, which was followed by the submission of a report to the prosecution concerning crimes of cutting and looting of forest trees in their intervention area.

According to Al Akhbarthey explain there that one of them had received a phone call reporting that a truck illegally charged wood in one of the municipalities in the province of Ifrane.

They would then have tried to contact their direct superior, without success, which led them to request the instructions of the provincial director of the agency.

The latter, according to daily sources, asked them to follow the instructions of the prosecution, which ordered the local royal gendarmerie to mobilize a patrol to lend them a hand.

This is how an interception operation was organized.

Al Akhbar Indicates that the two agents indicated in their report that the targeted truck refused to comply and fled.

During the prosecution, a vehicle would have intervened to block forest agents.

Its owner would then have threatened the agents, claiming to benefit from the support of influential personalities in the region as well as within the Water and Forests Agency.

Finally, the gendarmerie services managed to seize the flight truck and, according to the instructions of the prosecution, gave it to forest agents, with its documents.

However, still according to the report, the vehicle has been returned to its owner on the basis of false information provided by an agent claiming to instructions from the prosecution.

While waiting to know the epilogue of this case, Al Akhbar Indicates that in the aftermath of the facts, the forest agents found that a large amount of trees had been shot in an area a hundred meters from the place where the truck had been spotted.